Meet Theodore W.Scull

I am happiest near water, over water or better still on a conveyance moving through water. When my brother Sandy and I were deemed old enough, mother took us to Europe by ship. Foreign travel soon became a cherished part of my life and living abroad in Paris and London only added to the opportunities.

Over these many decades, I have spent more than five years of my life on overnight vessels of all types — ocean liners, cruise ships, riverboats, night boats, coastal vessels, expedition ships, sailing ships and even a couple of freighters, while traveling to over 120 countries on seven continents.

After working for Holland America Line, my first full-time job, and a decade of teaching with the summers to travel, I took up travel writing with an emphasis on the cruise industry, initially for newspapers and the travel industry, then shifting to magazines, websites, and lecturing. I also wrote a cruise guide —“One Hundred Best Cruise Vacations” — that ran to four editions, covering the waterfront with the best of every type of ship available.

Having traveled a lot, and I mean real travel, by land and especially by train and over the road, I began to gravitate more to smaller ships, ones that kept in touch with their cultural and geographic surroundings. People I met started asking me where to find more information on smaller cruise ships.

A half-dozen years ago, I went to publishers with the idea of writing such a guide and got turned down. The money was in writing about the big ships where far more people had an interest. However, now with the Internet, small-ship alternatives suddenly became doable. Then in late 2014, Heidi Sarna, who I first met 25 years ago in a cruise magazine office in the Lincoln Building across from Grand Central, had the same idea to develop a website resource along these same lines; she had already chosen a name — QuirkyCruise: A Guide to Small Ships. It took me seconds to say “Yes, let’s collaborate.”

Here are the initial results of our endeavors, a labor of love that will be expanded, improved and updated — thanks to the Internet.

We hope you will find your ship, and many more after that.